In The Carhop's Heyday, Fast Food Meant Special Delivery

December 30, 1985|By Lisanne Renner of the Sentinel Staff

Another Saturday night, and things are hopping down at the Steak N Shake. Classic cars are parked under the canopy. Cruisers are wearing letter jackets and sporting duck-tail hair. The boom box is playing a 1960 hit, ''You're 16, You're Beautiful and You're Mine.'' And across the parking lot skates a waitress on wheels.

''She looks like a million bucks,'' says Barry Stoyer, a grown-up greaser who's likely to speak of a cute carhop or his '58 Ford with equal amounts of awe. ''Just let her give me a tray and I'll pass out in my car.''

Cars and food go together like french fries and ketchup, but the carhops who run back and forth between car windows and food pickup windows are becoming as rare as fuzzy dice.

The A&W root beer stand, with its roller-skating carhops, closed on Orlando's Colonial Drive in the 1970s. Frisch's Big Boy is still flipping burgers, but all of its waitresses stay indoors tending tables. Steak N Shake is probably the only place in the Orlando area where a driver can still pull up to the curb, roll down the window and get dinner hung on the door.

Carhop Tracy Buck skates up to customers only on Saturday nights and only at the Winter Park Steak N Shake on Semoran Boulevard, and she serves only hot chocolate and coffee. Carhops are a once-a-week nostalgia treat at this Steak N Shake, where members of classic-car clubs congregate. Buck is 20 years old; she was just a baby when members of Barry Stoyer's generation were growing up, eating burgers in their Chevys.

As a teen-ager, Sharon Coulombe wore white majorette boots with tassles while working as a carhop in New Hampshire. Had Coulombe and Stoyer grown up in the same town in the late 1950s, she might have brought trays of food to Stoyer's car. But on a recent Saturday night, Coulombe, 44, and Stoyer, 43, were both hanging out at the Steak N Shake sharing nostalgia instead of fast food.

Coulombe explained the code of communication between carhops and customers: Blinking headlights mean that customers want something -- maybe they want their tray taken off the car. A honking horn means they want it now. Coloumbe said that when a car full of rowdy guys got impatient during her carhopping days, ''you'd find trays out on the road.''

Jo Ellen Szabo began working as a carhop at the Steak N Shake on West Colonial Drive in Orlando 11 years ago. During her first night, she learned about the dastardly sport called ''dine 'n' dash.'' She brought four trays of food to a car full of teen-agers, who sent her back for ketchup and then dashed off. They left no money, just smashed trays and dishes.

Szabo later learned about the perils of power windows when she accidentally hit the power-window button while hanging a tray. A plate of spaghetti landed in a man's lap.

Along with carhop catastrophes, there have also been touching gestures. Carhops, for instance, have brought napkins to brokenhearted, tearful teen- agers.

Customers sometimes return the kindness. Szabo is now a supervisor, but she recalls the thoughtful things customers did during the six years she worked as a carhop. One winter a sympathetic customer bought her a black sweater to match her uniform. In nasty weather, said Szabo, carhops may endure pelting rain or shivering temperatures while indoor waitresses stay comfortable, but carhops also get better tips.